Friday, May 27, 2016

For some reason or other, we expect that the Supreme Court
will solve the problem of affirmative action. Some people actually believe that
when the Court definitively approves affirmative action, racial animus will end and people who
on the lower end of the achievement scale will magically rise to its higher
ranks.

Those who believe in court mandates or who believe that you can
legislate reality have been having a difficult time wrapping their
minds around the failure of affirmative action. Today’s student activism-- mindless, pointless and radical at the same time-- is but a symptom of a policy
failure.

Affirmative action policies are the contrary of meritocracy.
In a true meritocracy, everyone is judged by his merits. In traditional Chinese
meritocracy—the Chinese seem to have invented the idea many centuries ago—everyone
has the right to take the same qualifying exam, whether for entrance into
schools of higher learning or into the class of mandarins.

Those who come out on top come out on top. Those who don’t,
don’t. No one judged by anything other than his ability to answer the questions
on the test.

It’s fair, don’t you think?

With affirmative action, it does not matter if everyone has
taken the same test. If the outcomes seem skewed in favor of members of one
group, the test must be rigged. By these thinkers, equality only exists when
the outcomes are proportionate to the racial or ethnic mix of the test takers.
If everyone has been telling you, has been pounding into you, that you are just as good as everyone
else, then disparate test results can only be a sign that the tests are rigged.

In New York’s Stuyvesant High School, where admission is
based on test scores, 70% of the students are Chinese or Asian, 20% are white
and the rest are African-American or Hispanic.

This all defies the convictions of those who believe in
equality. By their lights, all inequality is based on bigotry and oppression.
If everyone is equal in all ways, then inequality is a sign of injustice. It
does not cross the mind of these social justice warriors that some people work
harder than others, that some people have more aptitude for certain subjects
than others, that some people live in more stable homes and communities.

And it certainly does not cross their minds that they ought
to gain more than the most superficial understand of what the word equality
means.

For them, it’s all bigotry all the time. It’s almost as though
they believe that the system is rigged against them, to the point where they
can never succeed, no matter what. This is not the kind of thinking that will motivate you to excel.

Evidently, a culture that values meritocracy is not at all
the same as a culture that plays on identity politics.

The
identity politics the students have produced inverts the values of the
meritocracy. The meritocracy is striving toward excellence; identity politics
is deeply egalitarian. The meritocracy measures you by how much you’ve
accomplished; identity politics measures you by how much you’ve been oppressed.
In the meritocracy your right to be heard is earned through long learning and
quality insight; in identity politics your right to be heard is earned by your
experience of discrimination. The meritocracy places tremendous emphasis on
individual agency; identity politics argues that agency is limited within a
system of oppression.

The current wave of identity politics shows that affirmative
action has failed. It has failed even more miserably since our great nation, in
a spasm of righteousness, decided in 2008 to make the presidency an affirmative
action job.

As social experiments go, the presidency of Barack Obama has
been a major failure. It could have convinced minority group members to work
harder to compete in the world and even to reject the false promises that were
being offered by affirmative action. In truth, it did just the opposite. It
made them even more embittered.

If Barack Obama could not succeed and could not improve the
lot of black Americans, that could only mean that the racism and corruption of
the system was far worse than they had imagined. In place of cosmetic fixes,
the new radicals wanted to destroy the entire system, to bring down America.

No one seemed to notice that the more you think about
bigotry, the more you dedicate your mind to finding it and fighting it, the
less you will be working to improve yourself and to rise up in the meritocratic
ranks.

Nathan Heller identified the role of Obama in a recent New
Yorker article:

When
they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people
hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the
bill of goods they’ve been sold,” Romano explains. “And, as they get older,
they go, ‘This is crap! It’s not true!’ ” They saw the deaths of Michael
Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. And, at schools like Oberlin, they noticed that
the warm abstractions of liberalism weren’t connecting with the way things
operated on the ground.

Ah, yes, “the warm abstractions of liberalism.” The students
who have been admitted to schools by affirmative action have been recipients of
the good feelings, the warm empathy of liberals. They have been told that they
are just as good as everyone else, and that, given the right environment they
would excel like everyone else. Do these students, being the objects of a grand
social experiment in idealistic liberalism, realize that these liberals who
receive their votes have been lying to them?

Certainly, warm and cuddly liberals do not quite understand
what has gone wrong. Heller explains their special problem:

Such
reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout
liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism?
Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to
enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the
university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned
certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for
coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear.
Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides:
both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true
of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being
able to hear itself think.

Heller was explicitly writing about Oberlin College. He
selected well because Oberlin has been a laboratory for diversity.

He explained:

A
school like Oberlin, which prides itself on being the first to have regularly
admitted women and black students, explicitly values diversity. But it’s also
supposed to lift students out of their circumstances, diminishing difference.
Under a previous ideal, one that drew on terms such as “affirmative action,”
students like Eosphoros and Bautista would have been made to feel lucky just to
be in school. Today, they are told that they belong there, but they also must
take on an extracurricular responsibility: doing the work of diversity. They
move their lives to rural Ohio and perform their identities, whatever that
might mean. They bear out the school’s vision. In exchange, they’re groomed for
old-school entry into the liberal upper middle class. An irony surrounds the
whole endeavor, and a lot of students seemed to see it.

As it happens, these students have no respect for authority
and believe that the least harsh word is a crime. One professor was dismayed by
the fact that today’s students cannot even make eye contact. To my mind, this
is an excellent observation and a damning indictment. These students are far
from being ready to assume adult responsibilities. They are still cry babies,
running to Mommy and Daddy at the first slight:

Copeland
has taught at Oberlin since the nineteen-seventies. He was puzzled by many
things about today’s students—“They do not make eye contact! They do not look
into your motherfucking eyes!”—but what galled him most was their apparent
eagerness to go over their professors’ heads. In the late fall of 2014, during
rehearsals for a play he was coördinating, he spoke sharply to a student: a
misfire not of language, he says, but of tone. The student ran out of the room.
Copeland says that he wanted to smooth ruffled feathers and keep the production
on track, so he agreed to meet with the student and his department chair. At
the meeting, the student asked that he leave the room, and she and the
department head spoke alone for about half an hour.

Of course, as Shelby Steele has been pointing for decades
now, once you have different admissions standards for different ethnic groups,
anyone who belongs to a disadvantaged group is assumed to have received an
unfair preference. Even if said student could have gotten in on his merits, affirmative
action policies stigmatize him. Thus, other students do not treat him as one of
the group, but as a special case, someone who has not earned his way by merit.

Heller rendered the experience of one black woman:

Jasmine
Adams, a senior and a member of the black-student union, Abusua, is talking
about arriving at Oberlin.

“It
was, like, one day I was at college having fun, and the next day someone called
me the N-word, and I had no avenue,” she says. She has on a red flannel
button-down shirt, open over a tank top. There’s a crisp red kerchief around
her head, knotted above a pair of hip blue-and-brown-tortoised glasses. “My
parents don’t have the funds to drive to Oberlin when I’m crying and ready to
self-harm. The only way that I can facilitate those conversations is to
advocate for myself. That in itself makes me a part of a social-justice
climate.”

For Adams, everything is about race. After all, it’s one
subject where she has a superior knowledge and more experience. Unfortunately,
this narrows her focus and causes her to refuse to learn about anything else.
Identify people by race and they come to think that that is all they are.

In Heller’s words:

“We’re
asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so
tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of
the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to
my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago,
to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

Black students often end up thinking that they have been
conned. It would be nice if they understood that they have been conned by
well-meaning liberals, but that is perhaps too much to expect.

In Heller’s words:

But at
Oberlin a number of students seem to want to run away. More than a few have
told me that they are leaving Oberlin, or about to leave Oberlin, or thinking
about leaving Oberlin—and this at one of the country’s most resource-rich,
student-focussed schools. (“Many students say things,” Krislov tells me.) A number of them, especially
less privileged students such as Adams and Eosphoros, speak of higher education
as a con sold to them on phony premises.

And also:

Carey,
like Bautista, went to élite schools on scholarships; she says that, for her,
the past few years have been about “unlearning” most of what she had been
taught. She put together the symposium without support from the college, in
part because she thinks that higher education, being a tool of capitalism,
can’t be redeemed. Instead, her goal these days is to help people like her
survive college and get on with their lives. “There’s been a shift from
explicit racism to implicit racism,” she says. “It’s still racism. But now
you’re criticized for complaining about it, because you’re allowed to go to
college: ‘What are you complaining about? There’s a black President!’

7 comments:

Apparently this is a "neoliberal democrat" dream of which Bill and Hillary Clinton are members, although Obama as well, although the neoliberals originally came from the right, of Thatcher and Reagan's rise.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Thomas Frank talks about his critique of liberals in his new book "Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?" Here's a quote from an interview about the book.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/16/1516047/-Meritocracy-myths-allow-neoliberal-Democrats-to-proffer-education-as-an-inequality-palliative------Thomas Frank: This is a book about Democrats, and they see every economic problem as an educational problem, requiring more student loans, more charter schools. That sort of thing. People studying STEM subjects, or whatever it is. This is just how they interpret the world. Why do they do they interpret the world that way? Because that's what worked for them personally.

If you look at the biographies of different, prominent Democrats of our time, they all have this eerily similar biography. They are often plucked from obscurity by prestigious universities. Look at Bill Clinton, this kid in Hot Springs Arkansas, goes to Georgetown University, then he's a Rhodes Scholar, then he goes to Yale Law School. All his friends have this similar kind of background. Look at Barack Obama. He goes to Columbia, then Harvard Law School, and is the editor of the Harvard Law Review. For these guys academic achievement and prestige, that's what opened the doors for them, and it is very natural for them to assume that is what will open the doors for everyone else.

Now I'm a great believer in education, I spent twenty-five years of my life getting one. But I'm hear to tell you that that's not the solution for inequality. We need education, obviously everyone needs to know how to read and do math. We need experts.

That is not the problem with the economy. The problem is not that workers are not smart enough. The problem is that workers don't have any power.--------

So the problem with meritocracy is that those who have succeeded only see the world through their own path to success, and like the republican "trickle down economics" of Reagan, believe the only thing we need to do to make a successful culture is to allow the best to rise and assume all the rest of us get a free ride under their esteemed technocratic skills.

Identity politics is NOT egalitarian; it implicitly believes some "need help" and others must be "held back". (Another example for why I don not trust David Brooks.)

"If Barack Obama could not succeed and could not improve the lot of black Americans, that could only mean that the racism and corruption of the system was far worse than they had imagined." Or, maybe, just consider the possibility that he wasn't trying to do that. Maybe he was trying to make it worse.

Thomas "What's The Matter With Kansas" Frank is once again asking the wrong question because he thinks it's the right question, and can't tell the difference. His first three paras quoted by Ares does seem to have identified part of the problem. Education is part of it: how often have we heard that HS grads are not prepared for college? Pushing people onto the same track is a bad case of "one size fits all", people being different, if you haven't noticed. I do agree somewhat with his statement "The problem is that workers don't have any power." They are not allowed power by the politicians (who ignore them), which is an/the explanation for the rise of The Bernie and The Donald--which shows that Republican voters are ready for change. Democrats, not nearly so much.

When I read this article it appeared to me that these young people are literally driving themselves crazy with the leftist victimology mindset. Instead of being young, industrious and developing their intellectual abilities, they are instead embittered, self-righteous and dogmatic. Where is the joy in learning, the willingness to listen, reflect and refine your views? Moreover, it seems that everything is politicized and subjects that should have an independent standing are simply absorbed into the inevitable leftist troika of "race, gender, and class" with an accompanying leftist-approved list of oppressors and oppressed. This is what the Soviets did in the 1920s in Russia - only "socialist realism" was allowed. The left has created this culture and now the demon spawns it nurtured are devouring it. Any conservative worth his salt could see this coming decades ago.

Thomas Frank: "That is not the problem with the economy. The problem is not that workers are not smart enough. The problem is that workers don't have any power."

And what will become of our country when workers get this... "power"?

This kind of critique translates back to Marx, and his most devastating error. Marx believed that workers create value -- that labor is the most important part of the production process. And justice correlates to the workers owning the means of production, so as to free themselves from capitalist oppression.

That's patent nonsense. It ignores the human condition and diminishes the value of creativity and risk. Product/service creators and risk-takers are the people who create a disproportionate amount of economic value. If workers get the sort of power Frank talks about, people will create less and take less risk, because it inhibits their ability to create a return in an economy where competition is fierce and change is accelerating.

"Workers of the world, unite!" is the rallying cry of malcontents and morons. The problem in our age is that workers are not smart enough, do not adapt to change and do not have a work ethic. Look at the Millenials... they are busy talking about benefits, vacation days and other peripheral matters. They do not understand that employment is an exchange of value. They think they have a right to a job. To Sam L.'s point, employers are to conform to Millenial bitterness, self-righteousness and dogma. Which they learned in school.

"If you look at the biographies of different, prominent Democrats of our time, they all have this eerily similar biography. They are often plucked from obscurity by prestigious universities. Look at Bill Clinton, this kid in Hot Springs Arkansas, goes to Georgetown University, then he's a Rhodes Scholar, then he goes to Yale Law School. All his friends have this similar kind of background. Look at Barack Obama. He goes to Columbia, then Harvard Law School, and is the editor of the Harvard Law Review"

Very important to note that Credentialism is not the same thing as Meritocracy.

David FOster: Very important to note that Credentialism is not the same thing as Meritocracy.

That does sounds important. Do you have any best articles that help distinguish this? I see Wikipedia has an article:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_inflation---Credentialism and educational inflation are any of a number of related processes involving increased demands for formal educational qualifications, and the devaluation of these qualifications. In Western society, there have been increasing requirements for formal qualifications or certification for jobs, a process called credentialism or professionalization. This process has, in turn, led to credential inflation (also known as credential creep, academic inflation or degree inflation), the process of inflation of the minimum credentials required for a given job and the simultaneous devaluation of the value of diplomas and degrees.------

I do recall a friend a few years ago who needed to hire someone for a entry-level position for general office work, and said she had over 500 resumes to consider, and so as a first pass, she removed everyone who didn't have a 4 year college degree, while apparently not concerned about the exact schools or GPA. She herself had a masters degree, so it made sense to her to believe people who can handle higher degrees will be more capable employees.

Maybe that's not Credentialism in the sense of considering quality or status of the institution?

But of course the opposite can be true, like if you're a police officer, you don't want to be too smart, or show how smart you are.http://www.mintpressnews.com/can-someone-be-too-smart-to-be-a-cop/192106/----Although it’s not widely known, federal courts have ruled since 2000 that police departments can legally opt to not hire someone simply because he or she scores too high on an intelligence test.----

Churches, Temples, Mosques, and etc served as save spiritual havens and oasis from the world of flesh, politics, warfare, and etc. A place where men could get away from the world of men and be in communion with God or some higher authority.

Now, we have PC tards demanding Safe Spaces, a kind of quasi-spiritual realm distanced from truth and reality. Today's college kids have plenty of food, live in physical safety(especially in colleges which are extra-sensitive to the Left), and have it so good. But they feel empty and they've been told by their professors that they are 'victims' of something or other. So, they want these Safe Spaces, which is a kind of sublimated desire for spirituality in a non-religious world.

When religious people built churches, temples, and mosques, they were seeking and serving God. But what do PC tards seek to gain in their Safe Spaces? Since they don't believe in God or believe only in some New Age Deity(that can be molded into anything), their only religion is their own egos. It's all about self-worship, as if their tender feelings and simpering rages are what the cosmos should really be about.

We see this mentality in TREE OF LIFE by Terrence Malick who's turned dreadful of late. A New Age neo-Heideggerian search for 'authenticity' where nothing is more authentic than one's sense of ego and its place in the universe.

PC is a further perversion of that notion where one's ego is both the most fragile thing in the universe(deserving of safe space and protection) and the highest truth to which all must bow down.